Sunday, October 11, 2015

Seeking, Being and Doing on Our Journey of Faith

By Rudy
Barnes, Jr.

Our
journey of faith is a search for God’s truth.
It is a search motivated by doubts—doubts as to the truth of religious
doctrines and dogmas that should not be discouraged by the boundaries of
orthodox religion. Beyond those
boundaries there are few guideposts for seekers other than experience and
reason, but Jesus encouraged questions raised by doubt when he said: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and
you will find; knock and the door will be opened unto you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks
finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. (Matthew 7:7,8).

This
saying of Jesus is in the context of prayer, but it goes beyond prayer and
contemplates a detachment from worldly concerns and limitations that can open our
hearts and minds to a transforming spiritual power that Jews, Christians and
Muslims refer to as God and that Buddhists refer to as nirvana. For Christians, God has been equated with
love. (1 John 4:16-21). It is a mystical
spiritual power of altruistic love taught and exemplified by Jesus that shapes
our relationship with God and our spiritual being;
and it has a moral dimension that shapes those standards of legitimacy that
determine how we relate to each other—that is, our worldly doing.

Just
as our spiritual being motivates our doing, it can be said that, As the body without the spirit is dead, so
faith without deeds is dead. (James 2:26)
The relationship between faith and deeds (or works) has long been the
source of debate between Protestants like Martin Luther who have argued that
God’s grace is the sole source of salvation, and that good works don’t count
for much, and Catholic doctrines based on the passage from James that emphasize
the importance of good works to salvation.
For Muslims the Qur’an provides that both good works and belief in the
Qur’an as the perfect and immutable word of God are required for salvation.

In
a world of many religions, the exclusivist belief that God favors one religion
and condemns all others is inconsistent with the concept of God’s reconciling
love. Evangelism that has its focus on converting
those of other religions is not based on God’s reconciling love but on a sense
of religious supremacy that promotes religious conflict. Jesus taught that all who did the will of God
were his brothers and sisters in the universal family of God. He never
taught that God favored one religion over others—not even his own.

Jesus
was a Jew who rejected the deontological concept that Mosaic Law was God’s
standard of righteousness. Jesus taught
the primacy of love over law, a
teleological principle summed up in the
greatest commandment to love God and one’s neighbor as oneself. It combined the mystical being (loving God) with the moral doing (loving one’s neighbor); and when asked, Who is my neighbor, Jesus told the
story of the good Samaritan in which an apostate Samaritan stopped to help
a wounded Jew. It illustrated that loving
our unbelieving neighbors is the test
of true faith, negating exclusivist religious doctrines that condemn unbelievers.

Those
bound by exclusivist religious doctrines and dogmas cannot see the truth of
God’s universal and reconciling love and how it can set them free from the
bondage of sin and death. Religion can
be both good and evil. Satan does a
convincing imitation of God with some of his best acting in the synagogue,
church and mosque. How can we tell the
difference? God seeks to reconcile and
redeem believers with forgiveness and love, while Satan seeks to divide and
conquer them with fear and hate. History
has confirmed that religions have confused the forces of good and evil in the
past, and current events illustrate that they continue to do so.

To be or not to be, that is the question. That was the question of a despondent Prince
Hamlet as he contemplated death as a means to escape his complex dilemma. It is also a question for us related to our spiritual
being that not only motivates what we
do in this life but anticipates what
follows—of which Hamlet was uncertain.
Our being (how we relate to
God) and doing (how we relate to each
other) is shaped by an understanding of scripture and tradition that must be made
relevant to our time and place by experience and reason, including advances in
knowledge and politics such as democracy, human rights and the secular rule of
law.

Our
journey of faith seeks God’s truth, and that requires using our experience and
reason to interpret scripture. One of
the passages used to support the exclusivity of Christianity is John 14:6, which
has Jesus say, I am the way, and the
truth, and the life. No one comes to the
Father but through me. In the
preamble to John’s Gospel (John 1:1-14) Jesus is presented as the Logos or word of God made flesh, not as
God per se; and John’s Gospel goes on
to emphasize the new command of God to
Love one another. (John 13:24,35) A reasonable interpretation of John 14:6 in
context is that God’s word to love one
another is the way, and the truth and
the life. That word requires following
Jesus as the word of God but not worshiping Jesus as God.

That
is just one example of how seekers whose beliefs are not constrained by
exclusivist religious doctrines and dogmas can experience new revelations of
God’s word on their journey of faith, and it applies to Muslims as well as Jews
and Christians. God is bigger than any
religion, and God’s word is a living word that is not limited to those words in
ancient holy books and its meaning is not restricted to the doctrines and
dogmas of exclusivist religions. Believers
should be seekers who embrace experience, reason and advances in knowledge—including
critical biblical scholarship—that challenge the exclusivist doctrines and
dogmas of orthodox religion so that they can help transform the world with the reconciling
power of God’s love.

Notes
and References to Resources:

Previous blogs on related topics are: Religion and Reason, December 8, 2014; Faith and Freedom, December 15, 2014; Religion and New Beginnings: Salvation and
Reconciliation into the Family of God, January 4, 2015; The Greatest Commandment, January 11,
2015; Love over Law: A Principle at the
Heart of Legitimacy, January 18, 2015; Jesus
Meets Muhammad: Is There a Common Word of Faith for Jews, Christians and
Muslims Today? January 25, 2015; Promoting
Religion through Evangelism: Bringing Light or Darkness? February 8, 2015; Is Religion Good or Evil?, February 15,
2015; Jesus: A Prophet, God’s only Son, or the Logos? April 19, 2015; An Introduction to God is Not One,
by Stephen Prothero, April 26, 2015; Christians
Meet Muslims Today, June 14, 2015; Freedom
and Fundamentalism, August 2, 2015; What
Is Truth?, August 30, 2015; Politics
and Religious Polarization, September 20, 2015; and Faith and Religion, the Same but Different, October 4, 2015.

2 comments:

You might be surprised to know that the argument you've made here would find an ally in Jonathan Edwards, who agrees with your underlying message, at least insofar as he says the surest sign that a person has God's grace is that the person practices acting out God's love. Real faith shows itself in our habits. Edwards was in my head because the students in my "Big Reveal" class (in which we read various versions of "epiphany" across American literature) and I were reading him a couple of weeks ago. He has a long long essay called "A Treatise on Religious Affections" that he wrote as the Great Awakening was winding down. He wants to defend the revival experience, saying that you need to have real emotional responses as part of your faith, but he also argues that the best way to tell if the holy spirit is really dwelling in you by the way you act, what kind of treasure you are seeking. You know the tree by its fruits, is one of the Biblical lines he cites, and that's how we believers on earth can best determine if we ourselves (or our neighbors) have the spirit. It's not what you'd expect from a staunch Calvinist! But Edwards, too, was busy trying to incorporate new scientific knowledge--John Locke especially--into his Christian faith.

Thanks for your comments, Ashley. I am surprised that Jonathan Edwards saw experience and reason as legitimate factors in shaping one’s faith, and that he, unlike Martin Luther, could see the essential correlation of God's grace with good deeds, as did the Evangelist James (James 2:26)—who Luther could not abide. But perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised about Edwards’ embrace of experience and reason since John Wesley, his contemporary, advocated those concepts along with scripture and tradition in what later became known as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. Like Edwards, Wesley was also impressed by the Enlightenment thinking of John Locke, but neither Edwards or Wesley appreciated the extent to which Locke’s ideas would be used by Thomas Jefferson to fashion the concepts of freedom and democracy that are at the foundation of our Constitution.For an overview of the evolution of the American Religion that emphasizes the role of George Whitefield in the Great Awakening, I recommend a delightful book by Matthew Paul Turner, Our Great Big American God (Jericho Books, 2014), especially the chapter on The Evangelicals are Coming.